Its limitations force you to solve problems in a creative way, and it can be a good programming exercise.
On the other hand, it can't handle UTF-8, which is annoying. (Yes, I know about Gawk).
The world took a wrong path when *nix tools were no longer seen as appropriate things for ordinary people to learn. (Yes, in the 1980s clerical staff in some companies were taught awk or even Emacs.) Productivity of the labour force would only rise. When my spouse moved to my country and didn’t yet know the local language, she worked for a multinational outsourcing firm. The job turned out to be little more than glorified data entry and it could have been easily automated with *nix tools piped. Hiring educated people to sit 8 hours a day and do everything manually was a waste of money and human potential.
Traditional nix tools come with a lot of UX baggage. A full programming language is likely better for some tasks, though *nix tools still have their place.
Your experience sounds similar to mine. Generally, my scripts are ad hoc and use only a handful of features at a time. They only need to be complex enough to get my data to the next stage in the pipeline, where another tool would probably work better.